Couple of people warned me about the quality of traffic that comes from adf.ly, but I’ve decided to give it a try.

JWB Campaign

Landing page

I have created a very simple landing page.

Target audience

As you can see it’s not a “we will offer you free ipad if you click here” campaign. I was looking for people who are interested in IT and in JAVA programming language in particular. It’s not an easy audience.

Campaign

I have bought VERY TARGETED traffic from countries I need and I’ve added some junk traffic as well:

if you want to increase your community engagement you can connect you Twitter and Facebook profile by providing special application to show latest news from your Twitter profile.

I know there is a way to publish tweets directly in your timeline, but this is not available for company pages and it’s boring to read 50 tweets a day via Facebook timeline, so why don’t you help your fans to get what they need.

Add the application to your page’s menu:

show the info like this

Oh yes, it’s good idea to check if the current user likes your page or not and to show a different header like this:

The animated cartoon tells a story of an enthusiastic Java programmer who found JRebel and how it changed him forever

Since we launched our weekly community management newspaper. we are starting practical webinars on different community management topics. The first one will be about “How to upgrade your Facebook page to kick-ass level”

Do you know you can make your Facebook page more community friendly and more engage-able? What about adding your last tweets, great videos from your company account or something else to your page and give your visitors a reason to stay more?

See more and subscribefrom here. We will have different seminars for different timezones so don’t worry about that :) We know what you need.

I was inspired by Lydia‘s talk during FOSDEM to share some thoughts about using trolls as a marketing asset.

Define

I am sure you know what is a Troll, but anyhow there it is, directly from UD:

A dumbass who makes idiotic posts in message boards newsgroups for the sole purpose of pissing people off, often lacking in intelligence. Sometimes compared to people who pass you by on the sidewalk then grab you in inappropriate places.

I’ve started my interaction with Java a long time ago – in 1998 (*), when a friend of mine show me thr good ‘ol Borland JBuilder and how to write Swing applications. I was using a very very old computer that I bought a day before that and my first compilation took 30 min or so.

Couple of months after that I betrayed Java and I’ve start using PHP and other easy to learn web languages, because my employer requires that, but I never forgot my loving Java.

14 years after

14 year after that I had the opportunity to be a part of Java community again. Of course I followed what’s going on with Java during the years and when the Oracle bought it I was shocked. They did the same with MySQL…

What is the future of Java NOW?

Last couple of months I am working with JUG and other Java boys and girls and I see that most of them are not happy, enthusiastic and don’t care about the spirit of Java (if I may use that expression).

I don’t want to start a technology flame war and I am not a Java tech person at all, but I am worried about the community around Java.

The Example
There are JUG’s with 1000 and more members, from which 50 are active online and 10 coming to an offline meeting.

Community?
Most of you can say Java is only about the technology and maybe they are right, but this is not what I think. Java is about the community also – There is no technology that can survive without a community around it and the community plays a big role to make a technology kick-ass.

That’s I want to find the way to scream “WAKE UP” and to push the technology forward.

So, where is the problem?
Is it Oracle politics about Java? Are you afraid of them?
Is it Community Management – most of the JUG lists are used as one way communication. There is no active engagement from the leaders at all. Sad!
Is it the “threat” of other languages? Really?

What do YOU think? How to bring back the passion?

I have my own vision, but I’d love to hear more about yours. Can you share it with me, please?

P.S I’d love to discuss this at FOSDEM and I may buy you a beer :)
(*) in my 1.0 version the date was wrong, sorry for that.

Abstract:
We’re living in hard times right now. Most of the F(L)OSS projects suffers from lack of volunteers especially if they must donate a large amount of time to this project. My talk will show how you can plan better your community how to measure it, how to use tips and tricks from the commercial world and how to use some agile methods and tools to make you community kick-ass squad.

How to plan your community for next couple of months; (ex. We need 3 more people to join our translation effort) and Create the Flow – how a bug report goes from bugzilla to the the end of it’s life. (a.k.a kill the bug)

Define how to do it (ex. Troll the forums, create twitter campaign, contact universities, or something else?)

How to Measure it (How many retweets do you have, how many clicks, etc) and Why?

How to find patterns into your community and how to use them. For example – Most of the answers I receive to my mailing comes during business hours OR Friday is not a good day to send emails

What is Agile and how to use it to make my community life easier? ( Trello show-case )

Create the infrastructure

Don’t try to find people who want to contribute.

Hell yeah. Try to create tasks first. Put anything you think can be doable in the next 2 weeks (This is your main task).

You can start from “we need someone to tweet using our account” , “we need a new wiki” or something more interesting like “we need someone to be responsible for beer giveaways”

Ready?

Invite

Ok, now invite ALL community members to create an account and to look at the task.

Let them:

Vote for the tasks. See how community see the importance of the tasks.

Add themselves to a task. It’s a common mistake project manager/leader/the big boss to assign someone to a task. Don’t do that!

Teams

Now you can see which people are willing to work together on a certain task and you can create a new board for them.

Let say you have a task website on the main board:

And there are 10 people that want to contribute to it. Move them to another board and let them create tasks, with a simple workflow:

Todos > Working on > Done:

Meetings

If you have well working community or some kind of core contributors, you can start every iteration with a meeting and to define all the tasks together.

Why?

This approach will help you a lot to do things faster. Remember define only tasks that can be done in 2 weeks (or 3 weeks). It’s much easier to create a simple skeleton of your website with most, most important functionalities (like who we are and join us) than to plan and create whole website in 2 months.

Step by step

Build a community and respect your community member’s skills.

Invite anyone to join and to help. It’s kind of easy to find someone to write a post in a forum or to contact a media representative, because this takes 3-4 minutes.

I was thinking to talk about “10 apps you can use for community enchanting” during the MozCamp in Berlin next month. I will be thankful if you give me some examples what tools, except so called “main stream” like Facebook, Identi.ca and Twitter you are using to deal with communities and what is the purpose of it.

Here is an example:

Tool: Trello (trello.com)
Purpose: I am using it for internal project management within the community core
Reason: Easy to use